Introduction and Biographical Overview

When I first read an earlier edition of John Chris Jones' Design
Methods I understood it to be a very important book on design, but
I did not understand it. Curious to learn more of the ideas behind the book,
I contacted Jones in the early 1980s. After many hours of discussion,
and a careful reading of all of his writings, the nature of Jones' radical,
often difficult, work has become somewhat clearer.

Of Jones' many writings Design Methods is the most important.
His intention in developing design methods was to improve the quality of
design by responding to the rapidly changing nature of design tasks. Addressing
this transition he has written:

Alongside the old idea of design as the drawing of objects that are
then to be built or manufactured there are many new ideas of what it is,
all very different:

design as participation, the involvement of the public in the decision-making
process;

design as creativity, which is supposed to be potentially present
in everyone;

design as an educational discipline that unites art and science
and perhaps can go further than either;

and now the idea of designing WITHOUT A PRODUCT, as a process or
way of living in itself. (Jones. designing designing. London: Phaidon
Press, 1991, p. ix).

As these new, more far-reaching definitions reflect, in Design
Methods Jones wasn't actually addressing design as presently conceived.
Under the benign guise of a cookbook format, he set out an entirely original
philosophy of design -- one that questions the aims, goals, and purposes
of designing, as well as presenting new methods of design. As Jones once
told me, the methods he put forward were part of "a much longer and wider
process. So it's not another way of doing design, you see, it's a way of
doing what designers don't do at all."

Jones first became involved with design methods while working as
an industrial designer for a manufacturer of large electrical products
in Britain in the 1950s. He was frustrated with the superficiality of industrial
design at the time and ahd become involved with ergonomics. He set up one
of the first labs in British industry that was devoted to the then newly
emerging discipline as a means of designing electrical equipment that better
responded to user requirements. When the results of his ergonomic studies
of user behavior were not utilized by the firm's designers, Jones set about
studying the design process being used by the engineers. To his surprise,
and to theirs, Jones' analysis showed that the engineers had no way of
incorporating rationally arrived at data early on in their design process
when it was most needed. Jones the set to work redesigning the engineer's
design process itself so that intuition and rationality could co-exist, rather
than one excluding the other.

This was Jones' first experience with design methods and as he
once told me, "I didn't want to get involved with design theory or methods.
I just wanted to get the ergonomics work into action. I only did the design
methods in order to get the ergonomics accepted, and that was there in
order to get the product better. I thought, well the right thing is to understand
their design process. So I did this ergonomic study of how the designing
was done purely with the view of getting the ergonomic information, which
was obviously sound and well tested into the engineering design process
at the point where it wouldn't be rejected, so that human requirements would
come first and the machine requirements would come second, instead of the
other way round, and in doing that I hit on what's now called design methods."

Jones' work with design methods led to his being asked to found
a program in Design Technology in the early 1960s at the University of
Manchester's Institute for Science and Technology. In 1962 he co-organized
the first conference on design methods, which was held in London. The first
edition of Design Methods was published in 1970 and it quickly became
the standard textbook on the subject, having since been translated into five
languages. Jones was later appointed first professor of design at the British
Open University. Since 1974 he has been writing and lecturing independently.

Bibliography

1950 - 59

Borth Review. Number One, Number Two, and Number Three. Edited and
published by John Chris Jones. Borth, Cardiganshire: 1949, 1950, 1951.

"The Operation and Design of Mine Winder Desks." Part 1: Study
of factors influencing desk shape and proposals for a new design. Part
2: Study of factors influencing displays, controls and the engineman's
efficiency and well-being. Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Company Ltd,
Manchester, 1957.

"A Credible Future for City Traffic." In Proceedings of the First
European Conference on Technological Forecasting, 1968. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1969, pp. 369-388.

"Conferences: A study of the possible futures of technical conferences."
Unpublished paper written in collaboration with N. G. Cross and R. Roy.
Presented at U.M.I.S.T., Manchester. 1, England, July 1969.

"Design 1: Imagination and Method, Designing as a response to life
as a whole." Technology Foundation Course Units 32-34, report written
by C.L. Crickmay in collaboration with J.C. Jones, The Open University
Press, Milton Keynes, 1972.

Letter to the Editor, The Listener, 28 December 1972, p. 898.

"Superman has had his day! or, How Can We Speak of the Future?"
A paper for the Communications Group, No. 6. Rome Special Conference on
Future Research, 1973. Also published in Interstate 6-7. 1976, 8 pp.

"The Future of Open Universities: a Collection of Ideas from Many
Sources." (unpublished report with C.L. Crickmay), 1973.

"To Be a Part, or, What is Second Generation Method?" Typescript dated
30 May 1973. Published in Student Publication, Vol. 23, 1974. North Carolina
State University, School of Design, Raleigh, N.C. pp. 9-11.

"ONCE ITS TYPED ITS PUBLISHED the story of my writings from 1950 to
1979 and attempts at publishing in microfiche and Xerox." written for
Allen Fisher for inclusion in Spanner 17. July 1979. In Interstate
14. 1981.

"Utopia and Numeroso: a conversation about the future of planning."
(personal publication), March 1981.

"In a Box of Chocolates- some favorite flavours of a connoisseur of
chaos." In problems of levels and boundaries: proceedings of the
second sn-theme conference amsterdam april 21-23, 1981, pp. 145-154. annetta
pedretti and gerard de zeeuw (eds) princelet editions 005.

The Electric Book: Volume 2: life in volume two. Unpublished, 1986.

The Electric Book: Volume 3: world perfect. Unpublished, 1987.

"The Future of Breathing." written for a book on the theme "Automobile(s)"
published as Le Futur de la Respiration in Penser L'Automobile, tome 1,Centre
D'Art Contemporian, Centre d'Action Culturelle de Montbeliard, Jean-Paul
Curnier,ed., 1987.

Book Review of Previews and Premises. A.Toffler, London and
Sydney, Pan Books, 1984, in Futures, April 1987, pp. 209-212.

Book review of The Nature of Time. Flood, R.,& Lockwood, M. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell,1986, in Futures, August 1987, pp. 483-485.

"from the electric book, volume 5: going south. a series of fictions
taking place on j-921, a synthetic planet idential to earth." version
2 of chapter 1. edited for screens and tasted parallels, April 1990.